Hellafunctional Showdown Presented by KW – Round 2

The Hellafunctional Showdown presented by KW returned to Irwindale Speedway for another round of head to head roval racing action and scrutiny from the high performance minds of the MotoIQ judges. For those of you new to the Hellafunctional Showdown, it is a car show for performance minded individuals who believe form follows function instead of the other way around. Vehicles are judged on the functionality of their modifications and the majority of the score is based on the times clocked around the Super-G roval course that is laid out in Irwindale Speedway’s oval race course.

We had a great turnout for the first round of the Hellafunctional Showdown presented by KW so we were very excited to see what kind of cars would turn out for the second round, and our MotoIQ readers once again did not let us down. We had a good variety of cars ranging from a rare 80’s platform to a new gen Honda platform.

The Super-G on-track portion of the Hellafunctional Showdown begins by lining cars up for a drag-race like start. This round we tried out a new automated timing system that we will be using at all our events from now on. That’s what the little tripods near the cars are.

For those of you who have been following the Hellafunctional Showdown you will remember that at round 1 our drivers voted to use their best overall time for their rankings. For round 2 things were changed up a bit and the vote went to using the combined average time of the driver’s best time around the Left and Right side courses. So let’s see how the competition fared!

We start off the results with Eric Sarmiento and his 1996 Mazda Miata. The Miata was stock engine wise and its power output did not allow it to reach the top of our standings. The car overall was pretty clean and tastefully modded, but it did receive a small Hellafunctional time penalty of 0.10 seconds due to paint condition. So its average time around both courses plus its Hellafunctional penalty gave it an overall time of 33.673.

Austin Day was part of the new blood at our second round and he brought out his silver 2015 WRX Sti. With zero “ricer” mods it did not receive a Hellafunctional penalty and was able to squeeze by the Miata with a 33.374.

I know there is a show aspect to this whole competition, but adding pretty arbitrary penalties to a completely objective measurement such as lap time seems pretty counterintuitive to the “function over form” motto… perhaps it would’ve been better to separate the two.

Also the stated penalty is meant to not penalize those that have kept their car stock or near stock as stated, but there’s several heavily modded cars who didn’t not get penalized for being “clean,” whatever that means.

You need not look at this event as purely on-track competition. This is an attempt to combine elements of a car show which is completely arbitrary, and elements of motorsport competition which is black and white. If you have a better way of accomplishing this, we’re all ears. Besides, the time penalties are quite small and almost insignificant. Try to have a little fun with it man.